The quickest and easiest way to create a new Coalesce application is to check out the starter project: https://github.com/IntelliTect/Coalesce.Starter. This project already contains all the needed projects, dependencies, and configuration. In PowerShell:

At this point, you can open up the solution in Visual Studio and run your application. However, your application won’t do much without a data model, so you will probably want to do the following before running:

Create an initial Data Model by adding EF entity classes to the data project and the corresponding DbSet<> properties to AppDbContext. You will notice that the starter project includes a single model, ApplicationUser, to start with. Feel free to change this model or remove it entirely. Read EF Entity Models for more information about creating a data model.

Run dotnetefmigrationsaddInit (Init can be any name) in the data project to create an initial database migration.

Run Coalesce’s code generation by either:

Running dotnetcoalesce in the web project’s root directory

Running the coalesce gulp task in the Task Runner Explorer

You’re now at a point where you can start creating your own controllers (or utilizing the generated partial controllers) to serve your own pages with your own scripts.

With these pieces in place, we now have a functioning page that will display details about a person. We can start up the application and navigate to /Person/Details?id=1 (assuming a person with ID 1 exists - if not, navigate to /Person/Table and create one).

From this point, one can start adding more fields, more features, and more flair to the page. Check out all the other documentation in the sidebar to see what else Coalesce has to offer.